Weekly Design Updates

This is the weekly call for updates for those contributing to design, as outlined here.

The idea of these it to keep all designers connected. If you are contributing to design please add your reply as a comment to this post by Thursday 23:00 UTC. All comments will be combined into a weekly update post on Friday for the design team.

Not a designer but you have something you’d like us to work on? No problem, you can also leave a comment. Just tell us what it is, if a specific team or skill also tell us that.

Just reply to the following:

What did you work on this past week? Anything completed (don’t forget a link to show us the amazing work!)?

What are you currently focusing on?

Anything you need help with? Got a tricky project? Are you looking for a task? Perhaps you know about a task that needs a designer or need a buddy to work on something (let’s support each other)?

Any links for inspiration you want to share (doesn’t have to be WordPress design links)?

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Seeing renewed activity on the #design-dashicons slack channel. We’ve improved the build process for making new fonts from the source svg files (props @joen). It’s nice to see new people who want to help out, e.g. @cathibosco but we still need more.

Longer term goal: convert the admin from displaying a font to using svg.

Short term goal:
Remaster Dashicons to be more in line with standard icon sizes. A set optimized for 18×18, as well as one optimized for 24×24, would be ideal. This requires careful redrawing of svg vector paths, as automated scaling results in icons with edges that don’t align to the pixel grid, making them blurry on low resolution screens.

I do think before too serious work starts on the 18/24px work (which I do agree is super crucial to refreshing icons), we should have some sort of kickoff meeting. Because if we do things right, we only have to draw one set (24), and then a few of those icons can then be drawn in 18 also (stroke/pixel heavy), whereas others might scale just fine (circular/abstract). Also worth seeing how this can be rolled out in phases, also in a visually consistent way. For example icons in the Gutenberg inserter could be the first candidate for 24px grid.